Walled Gardens Can Kill

Summary

I'm an Apple ecosystem user, owning an iPhone ever since a past employer got it for me to test our company app some 8 years ago. Over time, as I've upgraded, I've also incrementally moved over my family to the ecosystem, replacing our hp/dell laptops with macbooks and Samsung Galaxy phones with Apple iPhones. Apple's application ecosystem is pretty famously locked down. You cannot side load applications onto your iPhone, quite as easily as you can with an Android. There has been some legislative push to change this (with the EU enacting the Digital Markets Acts or DMA) but the sentiments among lawmakers and users are still divided. I didn't feel strongly about this, one way or the other until the experiences of last week. My wife suddenly fell ill and we had to figure out which hospital to go to, we were ill-prepared for this situation as we hadn't installed the insurance providers' application to check the in-network hospitals. Unfortunately for us, the insurance app is geo-restricted to United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Apple refused to install it on my phone. Normally this would be a simply problem to fix, just go to your Apple account settings and switch the region, but this too was denied, as I had the yearly Apple Music subscription. Changing the region in this case required calling Apple Support to cancel the yearly Apple Music subscription first, and we didn't have the time for this. Luckily I was prototyping with the idea of an Android Application the past week so I had the Android Emulator in my laptop, which I used to install the application, add our insurance information and figure out where to go. Just to be safe, I also ordered an Android phone to be delivered to me while I went to the hospital, where I used my iPhone's hotspot to set it up and show all the insurance information to the hospital staff. Had I not prototyped the Android Application the week prior, or had Android similarly locked down their ecosystem, we would've been in a much worse situatio...